Finding Your Leadership Focus: What Matters Most for Student Results

In his new book, author and international keynoter Douglas Reeves addresses a major challenge faced by today's school leaders: an ever-growing load of programs and initiatives. Reeves contends that program overload not only taxes leadership resources, but actually hurts rather than improves student performance. Drawing on recent research findings, this book shows how leaders can pare down from a proliferation of initiatives to determine what is truly most important based on their local concerns, challenges, populations, and other school factors. Identifying a specific set of leadership practices that are more strongly associated with improvements in student achievement, Reeves provides explicit guidelines for how school leaders can improve their most critical leadership decisions by simultaneously engaging in three essential strategies: monitoring teaching and leadership practices, building high degrees of efficacy among staff members, and focusing on a smaller number of priorities. Finding Your Leadership Focus is essential reading for new and veteran principals, teacher leaders, and PLC book study groups.